Greetings and salutations,
SystemImager(R) unstable 2.9.2 is released. This is a development release
leading up to the 3.0 release. This should not be considered stable
software, and should not be used in a production environment.
Official "testers" should test this release and send feedback to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. For others who test this
release, please send a quick "it worked on my box" message to
the same list.
Installation instructions
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RPM based distributions, cut and paste the following commands:
cd /tmp
wget http://sisuite.org/installer.pl
chmod +x installer.pl
./installer.pl -v -i -t devel
If you get dependency errors, you may also need to install the
following RPMs. These are the most common, but there may be
others that your system requires:
perl-DBI
You can find this RPM on your Linux installation media.
perl-Tk
You can find this RPM here:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=perl-Tk
perl-XML-Simple
You can find this RPM here:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=perl-XML-Simple
What to expect from this development release, and from SystemImager 3.0
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following are some of the key features or modifications that will be
included in the next stable release, SystemImager v3.0.
* SIS (System Installation Suite) script for easy installation
on RPM based distributions. Debian installation is still as
easy as lickety-split!
SystemImager is a component of System Installation Suite, and
it is recommended that you install the entire suite. The
entire suite includes SystemInstaller, SystemImager, and
System Configurator.
* Modular kernel
* SCSI, file system, other drivers compiled as modules.
* Network drivers compiled in statically.
* Many more network drivers compiled in.
* Gigabit Ethernet support on autoinstall clients.
* "Module only" drivers can be used, including network
drivers.
* Allows a "complete" kernel to be provided with
SystemImager
* Makes it possible to add support for additional file
systems much more easily.
* USB keyboard support on autoinstall client machines.
* addclients
* now allows leading zeros for client host names
* recommends the use of DNS instead of /etc/hosts
* Hardware auto-detection
* Necessary modules are automatically loaded.
* devfs is used
* Eliminates the need to keep up with device files for new
block devices as they get added (Hardware RAID controllers
for example).
* Building of initrd.gz from source code happens faster.
* tmpfs
* BOEL(2) now uses tmpfs as its root file system.
* Size constraint of files that can be copied to the in
memory file system on autoinstall clients is effectively
eliminated. See
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for
details.
* Additional filesystems now supported. The complete list now
includes:
* ext2
* ext3
* FAT (12, 16, and 32 bit)
* JFS
* reiserfs
* XFS
* boel_binaries tarball
* A single tarball of additional binaries (that don't fit on
the autoinstall media) is now pulled over to autoinstall
clients once network connectivity is achieved.
* This tarball contains additional kernel modules and other
binaries, such as mke2fs, mkraid, mkreiserfs, and their
shared libraries.
* Many additional features in BOEL including:
* a "vi" editor
* filename completion in the shell
* syslogd
* Auto-install clients can send their syslog messages to
the image server, or to a separate logging server.
* HP Smart Array 5xxx series
* Support for the HP Smart Array 5xxx series of hardware
RAID controllers has been added. These devices use
/dev/cciss/* device files.
* Other HP Smart Array controllers
* Support for HP Smart Array controllers that use /dev/ida/*
device files has been added.
* IA64
* IA64 support has been added.
* GPT (GUID Partition Table) support has been added.
* Build environment
* The entire SystemImager package can be built on any
distribution. It is no longer limited to a hand modified
version of a specific Debian release.
* Debian rocks, and I will continue to use it as *my*
development environment, but this will make it much easier
for packaging into other distributions, and for
maintaining past releases.
* Dynamic Partitioning support
* Giving users the ability to specify percentages or
megabytes for partition schemes.
* Easily change file system types used by an image. This
will an image pulled from a golden client using ext2 to be
deployed on a machine as XFS, for example.
* Easily change destination disks. This will allow an image
pulled from a machine with IDE disks to be installed on a
machine with SCSI disks.
* A single image can be used across machines using different
drive types and different file system types.
* netbootmond and mkclientnetboot
* The ability to control which PXE enabled machines boot
from the network, and when they boot. This will give the
system administrator control over network booting so that
a machine can be made to boot from the network for an
autoinstall, but not boot from the network after
completing the install.
* The imageserver can be configured to make PXE enabled
machines automatically boot off their own hard drives
after successful completion of a PXE based SystemImager
install.
* This allows you to plug in your brand new machines
(configured to use PXE at the factory) and simply turn
them on. On the first boot, the SystemImager imageserver
will install them, and on subsequent boots, it will tell
them to boot off their own hard drives!
Certainly it's not possible to include all improvements here, but as you
can see, there have been quite a few. Many of them are structural
changes that will significantly improve our ability to add support to
SystemImager for new file systems, hardware, and architectures.
And of course you will see a number of bug fixes. The 2.0.x series
happened to be a particularly buggy series. Funding levels have
increased, allowing me to concentrate more time and effort on
SystemImager and I'm anticipating that v3.0 will be a very
stable release.
If you have other features or modifications that you would like to see,
please submit a feature request (http://systemimager.org/support/) or
contact <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to commission development. If a
feature you are interested in is already listed, please add a "ME TOO!"
comment as a logged in SourceForge user. This will help us determine
demand for certain features.
Notes:
1. All of this is subject to change prior to release.
2. BOEL is Brian's Own Embedded Linux. It is the embedded Linux
used to autoinstall clients.
Please feel free to forward this message on to other lists, or groups
that use SystemImager and System Installation Suite (SIS).
Cheers, -Brian
--
---------------------------------------------------
Brian Elliott Finley http://baldguysoftware.com/
phone: 214.280.8188 http://systemimager.org/
---------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf
_______________________________________________
Oscar-users mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users
